Salmon Arm, British Columbia (BC)-based AgTech startup 4AG Robotics has closed $40 million in Series B financing to scale manufacturing of its Canadian-made robots, which it says harvest mushrooms as well as human hands can.
“You can’t build hardware in the agricultural space on a shoestring budget.”
Sean O’Connor
4AG Robotics
The all-equity, all-primary round was led by two AgTech investors: European B Corp Astanor and United Kingdom-based Cibus Capital. New investor Voyager Capital joined the round, with participation from returning backers InBC, Emmertech, BDC Capital (through its Industrial Innovation Fund), BC-based family office James Richardson & Sons, and Stray Dog Capital. The round closed in mid-July and brings 4AG’s total funds raised to over $60 million.
4AG, pronounced “forage” in a nod to the function of its offering, has developed a robot that the company claims can pick mushrooms autonomously with patented suction-cup technology. In addition to the hardware, 4AG is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) tools to manage crop yields and detect crop diseases. In an interview with BetaKit, 4AG CEO Sean O’Connor called 4AG an “AI company that had to build the hardware to do the job first.”
Harry Briggs, partner at Astanor, said in a statement that 4AG “could be at the forefront of the transformation of agriculture through AI and robotics.”
The company expects to use the new funding to deliver new AI-powered features, expand its team, and scale up production of its robots for global customers. 4AG plans to add 30 people in field services and customer success roles to its 78-person team, 66 of whom are full-time.
O’Connor said that satisfaction from customers and follow-on orders of robots helped the financing round come together. He added the company has sold 53 robots so far and is sold out until the end of February 2026. So far, the robots have been sold in Canada, Ireland, and Australia, with interest from clients in the United States (US) and the Netherlands.
“We’re seeing fleet expansion toward that fully optimized, fully automated farm, which is really exciting,” O’Connor said.
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4AG’s robots aim to automate the manual, labour-intensive tasks of picking, trimming, and packing mushrooms. According to the Canadian Occupational Projection System, employers have a difficult time attracting domestic workers in harvesting jobs due to the seasonal nature, remote locations, relatively low wages, and long hours. Sixty percent of Canadian mushroom farms could not hire all the workers they needed in 2022, according to a survey by the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council.
Unlike other crops, O’Connor said, mushrooms are harvested year-round, making hiring for picking jobs challenging. Amid this high labour demand, 4AG pulled in $2.5 million in revenue last year and is on track to hit $7 million by the end of 2025, O’Connor added. In late 2023, the startup raised $17.5 million.
Founded in 1999 as TechBrew Robotics, the company operated for years as an engineering firm building one-off robotics solutions for a variety of industries, including food, medical devices, and transportation. Around six years ago, TechBrew pivoted to focusing on a product for the mushroom industry. In 2023, it hired O’Connor, the former managing director of Conexus Venture Capital and Emmertech, and rebranded as 4AG Robotics later that year.
O’Connor said the Series B financing was a “good up round” that 4AG was happy with, bucking a trend in the Canadian AgTech industry. A recent ecosystem report by the Canadian Food Innovation Network (CFIN) indicated that Canada lagged in later-stage funding for foodtech companies, leaving the sector reliant on public funding.
4AG’s round was oversubscribed, O’Connor said, forcing the company to turn down investors in order to maintain dilution terms. The company also plans to raise an additional $10 million in debt financing.
O’Connor said he hopes that more Canadian hardware companies get the opportunity that 4AG has had to build with financing up front.
“You can’t build hardware in the agricultural space on a shoestring budget,” he said. “You have to have enough capital to make mistakes. You have to have enough capital to move faster.”
As for whether 4AG would ever expand its robotic capabilities beyond fungi, O’Connor said it was a faraway possibility.
“We constantly say we’ll be successful based on what we say ‘no’ to,” O’Connor said. “For now, it’s all mushrooms.”
Feature image courtesy 4AG Robotics.